Logic goes missing from time to time
INDU SARKAR Direction: Madhur Bhandarkar Actors: Kriti Kulhari, Neil Nitin Mukesh, Anupam Kher, Tota Roy Chowdhury Rating:
With all the controversy it attracted, nearly everyone knows what Madhur Bhandarkar’s Indu Sarkar is about — a political drama set against the backdrop of the Emergency.
The film opens in a fictitious village called Mubipura on the NCR-Haryana border. People are readying for a wedding when the cops suddenly arrive looking for men to round up and sterilise, as ordered by the now all-powerful government. When the men try to hide, the cops hunt them down and drag them away, even a 70-year-old and a boy of 13.
Next we meet the central character, Indu (Kriti Kulhari), an orphan who wants to be a poet but is told she must dream of being a good wife and mother. Following this advice, she marries Navin Sarkar (Tota Roy Chowdhury), a power-hungry bureaucrat who cares little for family.
Through the first half, Indu Sarkar remains the story of a docile orphan with a stammer and no self-confidence. How she stumbles upon victims of a police raid on a slum, decides to fight for them and becomes one of the most powerful voices of dissent in those troubled times, forms the rest of the narrative.
The film oscillates between political drama and Bollywood potboiler, with transitions between the two narratives being neither smooth nor convincing.
The background score is loud and jarring too. And Bhandarkar fails to exploit his stellar cast.
Logic goes missing from time to time, and instead we have lines like, “Ek goli ne mere jawan, 6 foot ke bete ko 6 inch ki tasveer bana diya”. In the end, the film’s most strident message is not about how one set of Gandhis failed the country, but about how vital free speech and the rule of law are to a democracy.